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. just don't lose your grip and the treasure map for modern globetrotters. discover some of you record breaking sites on you tube and know also in book form lam infusions announcement to the weekend that he was increasing the alert level of russia's nuclear forces is racing fears that the war, the russia launched against ukraine could turn into something even more dangerous, some kind of nuclear conflict law. taken a few minutes out of the t. v studio here in berlin, i. d. w to speak to one of the world's leading experts on nuclear weapons. name is james accent. he's based at the carnegie endowment thing tank in washington, d. c. and he writes from research is a lot about nuclear weapons and how escalate to happen between you came out. so i

asked him, what exactly 1st of all was it the vladimir putin has announced. please bear with us. there's some banging in the background. so put in order the russian defense minister and the russian chief of staff to increase the alert level, a rough as deterrent forces, which include, but is not limited to russia, nuclear forces, we don't know exactly what that's going to entail in practice. we wait to say the they've been media reporting that the u. s. government has not seen any changes to russia, nuclear force posture yet we may not see any. i hope we don't see any or the so most likely interpretation of the signal he's trying to achieve this. i can offer you various interpretation. i actually find this quite a difficult threat to understand what is trying to do. one possibility is that he's trying to say to the u. s. stay out of this conflict, do not intervene directly,

which is the threat that he actually made explicitly when he announced his invasions the russian people. another possibility is that he's trying to make the u . s. in its allies change their behavior to back off to lift sanctions, to stop supplying new effort to start supplying equipment and material to ukraine. another possibility is that the strike is targeted at ukraine itself. he's trying to scare them into backing down or increase his leverage, negotiating table and given the russian ukrainian negotiations, now appear to be ongoing part of it. what concerns me, it's not clear precisely what who did hopes to achieve through this threat, what specifically his tract. and how should people understand like the importance

of this, even in any of those interpretations? how unusual is age? for a leader, especially a leader of a superpower, to make a threat like this. it's unusual but not entirely unprecedented. if you look back to the history of u. s. russian and us soviet crises, the last time, one of those states alerts that nuclear forces during the crisis within october, $1073.00 during the final stages of the war. so you have to go back almost 50 years to find an occasion to find the most recent and kind of roughly analogous occasion to this that i didn't understand how unusual this kind of nuclear threat actually is. and you know, i don't think that putin is about to non nuclear attack tomorrow. but i do think that the danger of nuclear war, the likelihood of nuclear war is rising. and we should think about it in terms of risk,

which is the risk is the pro is the product of. busy probability and consequence and well the, the probability of a nuclear war is still functionally quite small. the consequences are so large that the risk kit in my mind is high, right? so we have pitching in this situation for making this threat. the western world is looking at it and thinking, well, what is the best response at this stage? what is your advice to us administration and leaders here in europe, who are thinking about how to, how their messaging should be now after this? right now my advice is to focus firstly, it is to stay the course in terms of the military posture at the moment. there is no need whatsoever to increase the level of american british or french nuclear. from. what i would try to do is to give you an offer,

and ultimately you credit has to negotiate an end to this conflict. if it's to survive as a, as, as a nation, as well as it's been doing on the battlefield. you know the story performances of its armed forces and ukrainians know that if they want to avoid the leveling of their cities to cause me in 1999 to 2000, they have to negotiate. so i think, you know, we should make it clear which functions were willing to lift up if ra from ukraine can negotiate a sci fi. i think that was something that's conveying the russians right now. ensure we have to try to find a way so that who team can back out of this crisis in a way that leaves ukraine as an independent state. that's not easy to do. we can't make him take that way. we can at least open the door in the hope that he will work for it. but given the fact that he has brought this nuclear threat element into these countries,

how easy to back down from such high stakes to accepting a solution which feels well below the rather maximum list forums with which she went into this. thanks to the bunch of unattractive options, right? right. negotiating the spot in a way that preserves ukraine as an independent state is an unattractive option. fighting a prolonged war against ukraine. there is a complete blood bar and results in the death of tens and tens of thousands of rough um service members is really unattractive. using nuclear weapons is really unattractive. so you know that could you have good options here? some that he wants to see, he faced with a bunch of out of the options and he had to choose the least of those, you know, put in is a position that many leaders find themselves when they not was to prove a lot less successful than they hoped they would be at the end of the day,

most was and through a negotiated process, in which each side has to make agonizing concessions that he hates to make. my point is that we should try to speed up that process so that you know, we, we make putin as likely as we can do. there's a lot here that's out of our control. want to make it as likely as possible. who can take this place stating way out this crisis as soon as possible in a way that doesn't involve like the destruction of ukrainian cities or we're still use of nuclear weapons. so that would be the kind of positive trajectory where the west can try to nudge that towards a positive least bad outcome. but what's the alternative where you see the risk of a chain of escalation lead to a nuclear use? there is power ways that you can imagine that the one, the honestly worries me the most in this situation is the pathway in which the

nuclear threat on this occasion fail. i think they will like, i don't think they're going to cause ukraine to back down all the u. s. and it's allies to back down. and putin is left fighting a log off of a prolonged conventional war. a russian economy is in tatters. russian soldiers are being killed left right and centre. there is no. ready end in sight of this conflict in with the half start to worry about whether he ruled home like for that kind of scenario. the possibility that as a last desperate roll the dice to try to bring an end to this conflict, putin uses nuclear weapons like i can't exclude that possibility match. that's the thing that we're at the most. and what kind of use of nuclear weapons would be, we'd be looking at it that way, he might use them in ukraine itself, or they might use them outside ukraine. has some kind of wanting to,

to lessen what kind of scenarios can you imagine most likely, in principle, it could be either very hard to predict what i would say. we may learn more in the next few days about continuous thinking in this regard. you know, it's possible that the total was completely bluff. i think that i'm like putting is blocking theory of international politics. hasn't done very well over the last few months. but we could see russia alert its strategic nuclear forces that the nuclear forces united states, it might place nuclear warheads on bomb. it might send more submarines to say. in one of those different cases they're putting will be clearly leveling a threat at the united states. and if it progressed, you could use in that scenario one with the long range to be. conversely, you know, ruffles. i have a large variety of non strategic delivery systems that con, united states, on a day to day basis. so delivery systems are not stored with nuclear warheads. if we

saw russia stop to move nuclear warheads from the storage locations, deployment, location of non strategic weapons, then roughly would likely be trying to convey nuclear threats to you credit. and in that case, if it ended up in nuclear use them, i think the target would be you cracked. so i think we would know a bit more about possible scenarios when and if russia nuclear posture visibly changes in the next few days. hopefully it won't. but if it does, that will give us a bit more about tell us a bit more about which is thinking and do where is the deterrent effect of the west nuclear forces here. because we were talking about actions, which would see that in me uprooted using nuclear weapons where nobody else has used them and facing the potential for a some kind of massive retaliation, perhaps also in

a new case. and so why, why, why these thoughts even possible given the potential retaliatory consequences? well, i mean, fuzzy rich, i point out that this kind of you, you can use is not on precedent or fact. the only precedent form, if you play, use it and you can use to try to end a conventional war in a way to avoid a huge amount conventional fight over the the big difference between the end of the 2nd world war in the pacific. and today is japan didn't have a nuclear armed ally and 1945 ukraine. the u. s. is not formal ally, but it's a friend if you and i, you know, i think the u. s. nuclear forces and french in particular, forces were white, heavily on inside. he will be fully aware use of nuclear weapons could lead to retaliation. that's why i think he's unlikely to do it. but i think the, the rationale here is that he will weigh up the consequences of using them or the

consequences of not using and if you use, if the consequences of not using them appear really terrible. you know, the loss of some dreadful conventional war. ready in a way that threatens in putin's mind great on power, then i think you start to get in a situation which may be the risks of using them as being lower than the risks of not using them. and you said, i mean maybe to close here. you said that there hasn't been something a lot of this nature since 973. that's a long time ago. how dangerous is this moment? is it also? do you feel the most dangerous moment in world affairs? since around that time, i find it very hard to quantify the level of danger that we now i do think that the very least is the most dangerous moment. you know, us russia crisis since not only the end of the cold war, but at least you know,

the last bible may, you know, the last 5 years. thanks to james i to, for taking the time today. if you want to follow more of our coverage of the crises that follows on youtube, on twitter, on instagram, and of course on our own website, d, w dot call. what making the headline is and what's behind them. dw news africa, the show that was the issues in the continent. life was slowly getting back to normal you way on the street to give you enough reports on the inside. our correspond that was on the ground reporting from across the continent, all the trend stuff. the mazda you next on d w a. what

people have to say matters to us. m. that's why we listen to their stories. reporter every weekend upon d w. this is dina being used africa on the program today. the africans struggling to escape the conflicts in ukraine. hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing the fighting in ukraine. among them are tens of thousands of african students. we hear how, what made it to safety and of her harrowing experience as she tried to get out of the country. it was very dark. it was horrible. like, i remember i was shivering, literally went class countries around the world overwhelmingly denounced rushes. invasion of you.